Peter’s Blog

We Will Remember Them

Friday, Nov 11, 2011

Today is
Remembrance Day and a number of us gathered outside the church at the base of
the tower to mark the two minutes of silence from 11 a.m. until 11:02 recalling
the signing of the armistice ending World War One. The large bell of Yorkminster Park and the
bell of Christ Church Deer Park both tolled for fifteen minutes calling the
community around to mark the silence at the accorded hour.

A number of
people gathered with us or stopped as they were walking up the street when the bells
fell silent. Downtown at the cenotaph
outside Old City Hall a great throng was gathered and another similar crowd at
the war memorial on the grounds of Sunnybrook Hospital. A vintage war plane on its way to or from a
Remembrance Day Service fly-by pierced the silence as it passed over our
tower. Another passed over Christ Church
on the west side of Yonge.

Of course
there were drivers in too much of a hurry to slow down and even one annoyed and
annoying pedestrian who almost pushed one of the women on the sidewalk as he
complained that we were blocking his way.

In what
seemed like no time at all the bells were pealing to end the silence and everyone
moved along to get on with their lives except of course those who had preserved
our freedoms and way of life, by laying down their own. It will be another year before their names
are read aloud in church, but a single day will not pass unblessed by their lives
and by their deaths.

The fallen
whose names below have been entrusted to our care, come from the two
congregations that merged in 1962 to form Yorkminster Park Baptist Church. I can't begin to imagine how devastating it must
have been for those earlier members of our church to lose so many young people
in such a short span of time. When we
remember them we are flanked by their parents and their Sunday school teachers
and Choir Director's and all who kept them in their prayers and preserved their
names in the years that followed the war.

The words of
the Canadian poet John McRae who laid down his own life in 1915 are etched on
the hearts of all Canadians. In the
closing verse he had us in mind when he wrote,

Take up our quarrel
with the foe:
To you from failing
hands we throw
The torch; be yours
to hold it high.If ye break faith
with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields